Aman Iman – Water is Life

Vision 21 has produced an exhibition entitled, ‘Aman Iman’, which is widely translated as ‘water is life’ in Tamashek, the language of the Touareg, nomadic desert clans who understand the importance of water. The exhibition will travel around Gloucestershire as we approach the second anniversary of the flood of July 2007. It will visit towns and villages that were affected by the deluge of water.

The floods showed how vulnerable our industrialized society is to an extreme weather event. The iconic image of Tewkesbury Abbey as an island brought to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s, Rime of the Ancient Mariner – ‘water, water everywhere, but nor any drop to drink’. The poem was written in 1798 and the ‘mariner’ was trapped in the ice in the Antarctic Ocean, until an albatross shows them the way out,… and the mariner kills it. This somehow seems allegorical.

Back to 2007 Gloucestershire, our roads and railways were closed leaving thousands of people stranded. Like billions of people on our planet we faced the prospect of poor sanitation and having to leave our houses to collect water. The loss of Mythe water treatment works left 350,000 people without mains water supply for up to 17 days. Castle Meads electricity substation was shut down leaving 42,000 people without power in Gloucester for up to 24 hours. With reference to Hurricane Katrina, if the battle for Walham electricity switching station had failed, the government had contingency plans to evacuate the populations of Gloucester, Tewkesbury and Cheltenham. In New Orleans we saw streams of SUVs leaving, whilst the poor were left to fend for themselves. 

Global Warming is intensifying the hydrological cycle. In the UK twice as much winter rain is falling in intense downpours as in the 1960s. It is accepted that climate change will lead to warmer wetter winters. However in July 2007 a paper in the New Scientist said that Northern Europe could expect to get wetter all year round. It said we can expect a significant increase in extremes of precipitation – both floods and droughts. So were the floods due to global warming? The Pitt Review said that the summer of 2007 was the wettest on record. Scientists rarely associate one extreme weather event with climate change. Meteorologically the intense rainfall was attributed to the jet stream being further south than normal. The exhibition also looks at how flooding can be mitigated by traditional methods in the countryside which are permanent and do not push the problem elsewhere.

One thing that is clear is that climate change is affecting our global water resource from glaciers to arctic sea ice and the exhibition reviews this situation. We can’t escape our greenhouse gas emissions or their consequences in an exhibition that highlights the rich heritage of Gloucestershire’s waterways, which ironically had a role in the industrial revolution that instigated the changes seen around the globe. There will be information available at venues on reducing emissions and water issues.

In ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’, David Bowie said “Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do”. That said it is also abundantly clear that humanity is using too much water. Rivers and ground water supplies are being denuded to the extent that the next generation face the very real prospect of being unable to irrigate enough food. Already many underground water reserves are being exploited much faster than they are being replenished by rainfall. In India, for example, some 250 cubic kilometres are extracted for irrigation every year, of which about 150 cubic kilometers are replaced by the rain. In China, 100 million people live on crops grown with underground water that is not being refilled. Whilst 90% of the crops in Pakistan are watered by irrigation from the Indus. Almost all of the river’s water is already diverted into the fields - it often fails now to reach the sea.

This brings us to another aspect of the way we live and how we are all interdependent. The exhibition looks at the idea of water footprints and virtual water. The water demand or water footprint of a country (industry, town or individual) is the total water withdrawn from rivers, lakes and aquifers. Our complete water footprint includes virtual water which is the amount of water embedded in food and manufactured goods. This embedded water can be imported. A T-shirt made out of cotton will have required a staggering 2,700 litres of water to grow the cotton. Pakistan grows cotton, which is irrigated by the Indus.

The disparity of countries’ water footprints is vast - The average household water use in the UK is 150 litres a day. A Gambian uses 4.5 litres a day. Humans need 20-50 litres daily for basic needs. We need to drink about 3 litres a day to survive and can live without water for about a week. Our consumption of imported produce means that in the UK each person uses a staggering 4,645 litres of the world’s water resource daily! A mere 3% is for household use. 73% of all freshwater is used to irrigate agricultural products and 24% is used by industry.

The exhibition also looks at inequality and social justice - today 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water. The UN reports that without action 7 billion people could face water scarcity by 2050. An estimated 2.6 billion people currently do not have water for decent sanitation.
Finally we look at renewable energy from our island nation, which could kick start a Green New Deal, providing many needed jobs and ‘keeping the lights on’, without building new coal fired power stations.

The exhibition visited the following venues/events throughout the summer:

• The Playhouse Theatre, Cheltenham.
• Cheltenham  Museum.
• Cheltenham Town Hall.
  Gloucester Cathedral as part of a wider environmental exhibition, ‘Reducing our costs and our carbon footprint’.
• World Environment Day event, The University of Gloucestershire, Oxstalls, Gloucester.
• June at Cheltenham Science Festival, Montpellier Gardens. 
• Cheltenham Borough Council, internal event.
• The Matson and Robinswood Eco Fun Day, Matson, Gloucester.
• Stroud Communiversity, The Exchange, Stroud.
• Cotswold Show and County Fair, Cirencester.  
• Forest of Dean District Council Offices.
• Tewkesbury Abbey.

For further details on viewing the exhibition or if you would like to invite the exhibition to one of your events please contact Vision 21.